The DPJ has dug itself into a deep hole, so anyone the party chose was going to have an uphill battle in winning back public support. But I don't share Peter Cave's view that the party's selection of Noda as its next leader was suicidal.

I can't read minds, but two reasons that probably figured prominently in the thoughts of at least some DPJ members who voted for Noda are the
following:

1) He has a better chance at bringing the DPJ back together after the Ozawa-Kan battles than the other contenders. A Kaieda victory would have antagonized the anti-Ozawa side of the party and a Maehara win would have upset Ozawa and Hatoyama. Noda presented himself as "neutral" in this battle and apparently won votes from each side after the other leading contenders failed to secure a majority. I think the DPJ has been hurt in public opinion by its reputation as a divided party, which the Ozawa-Kan battles have reinforced over the past year.
If Noda can bring into his cabinets some representatives of each side, perhaps creating a "proportional representation" of the leading groups within the party, he might be able to show the voters that he can lead a united party, and that would help the party do better at the next election.

2) He has a better chance of engineering a pseduo-grand-coalition with the LDP than the other contenders. Because he is not as charismatic and has policy views that are less divergent from the LDP than Kan's or Kaieda's, there is a chance that Noda will be able to convince the LDP to cooperate on an issue-by-issue basis on earthquake reconstruction, fiscal reconstruction, and maybe even pension reform.
Noda has a working relationship with some of the LDP members of his same generation. There is a chance that Noda can convince some of these people that the LDP's obstructionism is turning off the voters and won't succeed in bringing on an early election. There are many ways in which Noda could bungle this attempt to secure LDP cooperation in getting legislation through the upper house (Ozawa certainly bungled when he last tried to engineer a "grand coalition"), but if he can pull it off, this will also do a lot to boost his own popularity and that of the DPJ.

I wish him good luck.

Len Schoppa
University of Virginia